The Gleam Of A Pearl

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Ask a roomful of fledgling journalists if they would be willing to die for the truth, and not a hand will be raised. They do not mean no, exactly. They simply give the hypothesis a pocket veto. They think, for one thing, that the question is too darkly phrased and even implies an obscure promise of martyrdom--not normally the journalist's line of work. Ask the young roomful, instead, whether they would be willing to risk their lives to cover extreme situations in faraway places and report the truth, and the best in the room will get a gleam in their eyes--a little ignition of trench-coat wanderlust, their minds flickering in black and white for a moment, a few frames of '30s movies. Daniel Pearl, I gather, had the gleam. A sheer avidity to know things is the most endearing trait of any journalist. Long ago, the novelist and journalist John Hersey wrote in a sketch of Henry Luce, "He was amazed and delighted to learn whatever he had not known before." Curiosity is the noblest form of intellectual energy; in any case, your mind goes nowhere without it--except maybe to fanaticism.

For the polar opposite of Daniel Pearl's intellectual curiosity was the sort of dogmatism that took his life. An ideologue with a closed mind killed a splendid young man with an open mind. Not the first time that the desire to know has been murdered by the need not to know. Half the world belongs to candlesnuffers--to people who have no curiosity to find out, so to speak, how to take off or land.

Journalists are not often idealized or romanticized these days. Rather the reverse. Journalists' poll numbers are low. They have a corrupted image of lowest-common-denominator tabloid sensationalism, of superficiality and bias. Commentators, left and right, howl dogmatisms. Some of them take fat fees from companies like Enron in exchange for a few hogsheads of bloviation. But there should still be enormous respect and affection for the curiosity that you find in the eyes of real journalists, people like Daniel Pearl--not the mere shuck-and-jive entertainers and careerists but the intelligent ones who ask questions and respect facts.

Journalists are a varied assortment, of course--some of them as shabby, venal or self-important as the cast of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, the 1937 novel that is still the most hilarious depiction of foreign correspondents and their publishers in the grip of a vigorous incomprehension of just about everything. In the book William Boot, who writes a nature column for a British newspaper called the Beast--composing sentences like "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole"--is recruited by mistake to join a collection of journalistic mountebanks and hacks in covering coup and countercoup in the fictional African land of Ishmaelia. Much has changed in journalism since Waugh wrote, but no one who knows the current corps of foreign correspondents would fail to recognize a few types from Scoop.